The Hillsborough Flashfic Appreciation Society
by wugglyump
Summary: A series of older drabbles/flashfics, mostly focusing on Courtney and Aloysius Crumrin, with a few Night Things thrown in for good measure.  Variable ratings.
1. Hands, Trees, Snow

_All characters were created by Ted Naifeh and are copyright him(and possibly Oni Press). These drabbles were originally posted on my online roleplay journal. Some are also found on DA._

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><p>My hands are small and sleek and pale. The veins don't show, nor the tendons. My fingers are neatly tapered, the knuckles fitted into the flesh, not jutting out. My nails are pinkish, long, like kittens' claws. I don't paint them; that's too girly for me.<p>

You keep your nails cut very short, and you always burn the clippings right away. I've watched you do it, and wondered. Do you burn your hair-trimmings, too? What do you do when you shave?

Who is it you're afraid would get them and work magic against you?  
>There's so much I don't know about your past, but there'll be time to wait and ask later.<p>

The first snow of the season is falling, and I've dragged you out of the study to see. It won't stay; the ground is still too warm, but it's pretty to watch. Walk down to the bridge with me?  
>Snowflakes land on the crown of your hat and rest there a minute before they start to melt. Before long, you've got a silver-white dusting on top. It matches your hair. You notice me looking and scold me for not wearing my own hat. Get me one for Christmas and I'll wear it next time. You threaten to get me a bowler, like yours. I'm more of a fedora kind of girl, but I'll think about it.<p>

The bridge is slippery, and I have to pretend not to notice how cautious you are with your walking stick. You may be in good health, but you still feel like you can't afford a fall on the ice. And I know your chest still hurts you sometimes, where Templeton hit you. I'm not allowed to worry.

Snow makes the quiet of the woods even quieter. It's as if everything is holding its breath to listen to each flake hitting the stream below. Even the water is quiet, only a faint rippling mumble.  
>On the east side of the stream there are two trees close together. One is taller, older; its roots are fanned out across the ground, rough with bark and twisting together. The other is only a sapling, growing so close to the old one it might be a seed dropped from it. Some of its roots twine around the older tree's, smaller, smoother and more fragile-looking. I've been staring at them for a long while before I notice you've put your hand in mine to keep us both warmer.<p>

Your hand is large and strong and rough with calluses, lined with veins. The knuckles are knobby and gnarled; you look like something hard, carved rather than something made of soft flesh. My hand almost vanishes within it, but I can see my fingers, woven between yours, like tree roots. There's warmth between our palms.

A snowflake touches us and dissolves into a trickle of water, rolling away onto the bridge. Maybe from there it will drip into the stream below and flow on by us, away to the sea.


	2. Morning Flight

It was a bright, breezy Sunday morning, about 9 AM. Aloysius was having a cup of tea (English breakfast, very strong, with milk and no sugar) when a twinge in the house wards told him there was something on the roof. Something rather larger than a squirrel or even a raccoon. Anticipating some sort of damnable flying hobgoblin, he sighed and grabbed the broom, then headed up to the attic.

To his surprise and consternation, the window there was already open, and when he pushed his head and shoulders out of the narrow aperture, he saw not a winged Night Thing, but his niece, perched blithely on the slope of the roof. Her arms were flung out, her head tilted back into the wind.

"Courtney! Have you taken leave of your senses?"

She dropped her arms abruptly, embarrassed. "…um. Good morning, Uncle A."

He raised an eyebrow. "Yes, good morning. Do you often start your day on top of the house?"

"I was just…thinking about the wind, and flying." She shrugged. "I'd like to fly sometime. It's too bad there aren't any spells for it but the ones that use dead baby-fat."

Aloysius made a mental note to check the security spells on his necromancy books. "Aside from being incredibly distasteful and unethical, those aren't literal effects. Those spells create powerful hallucinogens that bring about a euphoric-look, would you get in here before you slip and fall? I'll show you a proper levitation spell if it will keep you from trying to break your neck."

"Really? Promise?" Her eyes shone.

"Promise." He held out a hand impatiently.

As she took it, a gust of wind tousled her yellow hair. He pulled her back into the attic and shut and locked the window, then brushed stray locks out of her face. "Never do that again."

She wrinkled her nose, annoyed. "Fine. Levitation?"

"After breakfast, you reckless, single-minded, stubborn little creature." He could keep the frown on his face, but he couldn't hide the smile in his eyes.


	3. Fools Rush In

Fools rush in, he tells her for the umpteenth time as he disenchants some sort of ridiculous magical injury she's done herself in practicing her newfound abilities. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Be more careful, silly girl.

"I'm no angel, Uncle A," she grins, somewhere between sly and apologetic.

He knows that well enough. Still, there's a kind of purity in her refusal to lie down and accept life's inevitable injustice, her bursts of cranky, reluctant compassion.

He wants to pull her into his arms and hide her from the world, charge into every fray to defend her. Wants to make sure she knows he loves her with everything he's got.

But it's not in him to be that demonstrative.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.


	4. Sugar and Spice

_Snips and snails, sugar and spice._  
>You laughed the first time you heard that nursery rhyme. No one knows better than you what little boys and little girls are made of. You laughed and said they are made of meat and tendons, bones and blood and bile and salt, just like big boys and girls, just like old men and women. And, oh! The spurts of fluid and the gurgling screams and the grind of your teeth as they scrape the bones clean…<br>You laughed, and tore, and laughed again. But later on you thought about it and wondered. Your mind is like the marl-pit, too dark and damp and full of old dead things to really be fathomable to anyone but yourself. You like it that way. There is no defense like being a Monster. Still, you could not help but wonder. _Snips and snails, sugar and spice._

In the old days you were a god, a consort to the Chthonian Goddess, and the guardian to her Womb, the earth. A personification of Time and Decay. Your old name has been forgotten. Even you have forgotten it. But you remember the sacrifices; the boys thrown into the marl-pit, bound hand and foot. They cried when you came for them, but they did not beg. Never once. Brave little lambs to the slaughter, you loved every one of them more than their fragile human hearts could comprehend.  
>They all beg, these days. Children, grown-ups, they're all the same. Futile attacks, horrified screams, moans of despair as the light slowly goes out behind their eyes. In retrospect, you think that is part of why Aloysius Crumrin caught you by surprise. You had grown far too used to the initial posturing being followed by pleas for mercy. Ah, Tommy, you've gone soft in your old age, haven't you?<br>But it was the little girl that really threw you for a loop that night. You came up behind her and asked her, politely, if she lived in the house to which you had been summoned. It was merely a formality; you could feel she was of Crumrin's blood. Blind terror was what you expected. What you got was a childlike attempt at misleading you. You might as well have been her teacher asking why she had not done her homework. You wonder now what she would have done had you pretended to believe her, and gone inside to destroy her unsuspecting parents as commanded. Would she have followed and tried to save them, or run away to no avail?  
><em>Sugar and spice.<em>

And then waking from your death—only the most recent in a long line of them—to find that same face peering at you. Dark, shrewd eyes and little pink lips permanently set in a frown; a curtain of pallid hair falling over a thought-wrinkled forehead. Funny little girl-child with a steel coil instead of a spine, she had more charisma just then than she could possibly have been aware of. If that bastard warlock hadn't spelled you silent, you'd have told her anything she wanted to know—for a price.  
><em>Sugar.<em>

There was silence for a while, and peace, and then her voice shattered the stillness. Ashes drowned in blood drew together, a new-old body to join your monstrous head. When you rose up and shook the kinks out of your spine, she was there, watching, blood-spattered and dressed in her pajamas, with a dagger in one hand and a wreath of oak leaves on her head. She looked like a little priestess of the old ways, and you smiled a smile from the bottom of your rotted, black heart.  
>"Hector," she said, and you always did know a command when you heard one.<br>You answered, "My pleasure, Miss Crumrin."  
>She grinned at you, with her pink-petal lips and her perfect, white little-girl teeth, and you noticed her irises were so dark you could not tell them apart from the pupils. Shadowy eyes with flashes of light in them, not so different from your own.<br>_Spice._

You could have had her, you tell yourself now, sitting in the shadow at the bottom of the pit. So close. There is a shoe in your taloned paw, a girl's shoe, a little sneaker with white laces stained grey and treads worn down from the forest paths. So close. You're not certain why she was here, or why she was pursued by that foolish young deputy, but it doesn't matter to you much. She was here, you could have had her, but you let her go.  
>You'd like to believe it was sheer bloody-mindedness. Hector clearly wanted you to take her. You'll never acquiesce to any command-or plea-of his ever again. But somewhere in the convoluted, death-haunted twists of your ancient mind, you know it has nothing to do with Hector and everything to do with you, and her.<br>You tug at the lace of the little shoe she left behind, pulling it free of the eyelets, your razor-claws not even fraying the edges. You imagine you are carefully, ever so gently, cutting her spine free of her body, severing tendons so skillfully she barely feels the pain. Bringing the shoe closer to your face, you inhale the scent of the woods, the scent of her sweat. You imagine the scent of her blood. You run the tip of your tongue around the sole, lap with it over the instep, thrust it into the cavity of the shoe. The lingering taste is bittersweet, the delicate marzipan-flavor of a girl in early adolescence.  
>The skulls are watching with their empty eyes. Hector is the only one that dares make a sound, and he is cackling, low and soft. "That's right, Beast. Brute. Monster. Devil. She'll be here sooner or later. Down at the bottom with all the bad little children who tell lies and speak profane curses. Then you can do whatever you want with her."<br>You could crush him. What's left of him. But that would be too easy.  
>"Keep your silence, little soul," you snarl lazily, "and do not presume to know my thoughts, or my desires."<br>With a flick of your wrist, you send Hector's skull rolling across the rocky floor. It comes to rest in a pool of filthy water, and you turn away, paying it no more heed.  
>But your mind is like the marl-pit, dark and deep. There are things within it that are better left buried.<br>_Snips and snails, sugar and spice._


	5. Logos

Courtney comes to the study in the evenings before bed to watch her uncle read and compose essays. The room is dry and warm and a little stuffy, but she loves it because he loves it.  
>He seems made of the elements of the world he has chosen: skin as weathered as the leather bookbindings, hair the color of parchment, candlelight flickering in his pale eyes.<br>Some of his books are still locked to Courtney.  
>A great deal of him is locked to her, too.<br>She watches him with dark eyes and wishes he would let her turn the page.


	6. Real

"Hey, Courtney!" A brown-skinned boy with thick black curls flopped onto the steps next to a scrawny eight-year-old girl.

"Mmm? Hi, Malcolm." She answered vaguely.

It was a sunny afternoon in the Philadelphia neighborhood. The street shimmered, waves of heat rising off the asphalt. There hadn't been enough rain lately, and the few stunted saplings that grew from spaces in the sidewalk were wilting. Courtney was curled in the shade at the front of her apartment building, reading a book.

"You want to go skating? Or sneak into the movies?" Malcolm asked eagerly.

In point of fact, they had _never_ been successful at sneaking into the movie theater, but they kept trying.

"Um…in a minute. I'm almost done with this chapter." She didn't look up.

He frowned, waited a few seconds, then vied for her attention again. "We could go to the 7-11 and buy candy and slurpees. I have some allowance money."

"Just gimme a minute, okay?" Courtney snapped, turning a page.

Malcolm sighed and craned his neck to read the cover of the book. 'The Unicorn Treasury' it said. He rolled his eyes. When she finally closed the book, he asked, "Why do you read that stuff? I mean, you don't read anything else."

She shrugged and shoved the book into the pocket of her shorts. "'Cause I like it."

"You know it's all fake, right? I mean, unicorns and magic and stuff. It's not real."

The little girl scowled and toed a loose pebble. "That doesn't matter. It's not about whether it's real or not. It's about all the things you could do if it _were_ real."

He blinked at her. "You're weird sometimes, you know?"

Courtney shrugged again and stood up. "Deal with it. I want a slurpee. C'mon."

As they ran off toward the 7-11, a unicorn, only slightly distorted by the bend in the book cover, peered out of her pocket.


	7. Gruagach

"Nothing doing," Courtney shook her head, regarding the shaggy black pony by the side of the road. "I know what kind of pony you are. No offense or anything."  
>It looked at her with mournful green eyes and shook a few burrs out of its mane. "Aw, hey. I thought little girls were supposed to love horses…"<br>"I'm not really an animal person. Anyway, I don't think I'd love getting dumped in the creek."  
>"I'm supposed to level your fences and terrorize your livestock, too. Bet you don't have any." The phooka huffed irritably.<br>"Um…not really, no. I have an apple and half a ham sandwich left over from lunch, though. Want 'em?"  
>"First she rejects me, now she tries to bribe me." the Night Thing rolled its eyes. "Oh, very well, give them here."<br>Then, while she was absorbed in shrugging her backpack off her shoulders and reaching inside it to get out her lunchbag, it grabbed the back of her jacket in its teeth and pulled her off her feet and into the bracken.  
>"Hey! Augh! Ow!" For a moment, all she could see were her own flailing limbs.<br>After dragging her at a high speed for a few minutes, the phooka released her and stuck its muzzle in her face. Warm, cinnamon-and-musk scented breath wafted over her. "That's harder than it should be. My jaw hurts. You're heavy for such a scrawny little brat."  
>"Geddoff." She shoved its head away and sat up, covered with twigs and dead leaves. "Happy now?"<br>"Not really. This is boring. Go on, get on my back. You know you want a ride."  
>"I said no!"<br>"…how about a dance, then? I can change forms."  
>The young witch picked a beetle out of the creature's mane speculatively. "Yeah, okay. I could go for a dance."<br>The next morning, the newspapers contained reports of cars keyed, windows smashed, and mailboxes bashed in by a teenage girl accompanied by a green-eyed man with shaggy black hair stuck through with leaves and burrs.


	8. Gnosis

_A/N: This is from the perspective of Courtney's father._

I remember the first time I came to this place. Mom was in the hospital for leukemia, and Dad had to take care of her and still find time to work 52-hour weeks (I never knew anyone to work as hard as my father, and I doubt I ever will), so a neighbor drove my sister Mandy and me out here. Uncle Al came out on the porch when we pulled up, but he didn't come to meet us. We had to drag our luggage up to him. God, that man's tall. He just looms over everyone and stares them down with his pale, pale eyes. We were petrified.

He offered us hot chocolate, even though it was the middle of July, and he seemed a little perplexed when we said no thank you. Knowing him, I bet it was the only thing he could think of to feed kids. In the end, we just had ice-water and saltines. The crackers were stale, but the water was the best I'd ever tasted; I guess because it came from a well and not the city pipes.

Uncle Al obviously didn't know what to do with us, aside from feed us, make us sleep at appropriate times, and check to make sure we were doing our summer reading. Mandy couldn't stand him. She cried on the phone every night to Dad, asking when we could come home. Well, she was littler than I was, and a girl; boys weren't allowed to cry back then. Me, I didn't mind him so much. He liked to read; so did I. I finished up my summer homework pretty quickly and started scrounging for more books. To be honest, I think I was a little desperate for distraction. Worrying about Mom was really hard on me. I guess it would have been on any ten-year-old. Uncle Al was furious when he caught me in his library. For just a second, I thought he was going to hit me. But he didn't; instead, he pulled out a book of old folktales and sat me down with it.

It was the most fascinating book, full of heroes and fairies and goblins and unicorns and things I'd never even heard of before. And it never seemed to end. It was only about an inch thick, but the paper must have been really fine, or else my memory's shot, because I swear I spent the better part of a month on it, reading story after story and never rereading a single one. I read some of them to Mandy. Don't know why, but she never seemed to be able to stay awake through a whole chapter. Just as well, I suppose. She was worried about Mom, too. Needed the rest.

I had this funny dream once, too, while we were here. I dreamed I got out of bed in the middle of the night and heard a voice, half-singing, half-speaking. It was low and a little rough, but pleasant, and I found myself following it. I dreamed that I went up to the third floor and there was a fire burning in Uncle Al's study. He was there, bent over the book, my book, and talking softly. The firelight shone in his hair. I said his name, and he looked up, startled. Then the dream ended.

That's sort of what it felt like when the summer was over. Just when there was something warm and bright within my reach, everything stopped. Dad came to take us home. I wanted to take the book with me, but Uncle Al wouldn't let it go. He said I could come visit it, but that it couldn't leave the premises. It was probably very old and valuable. I've looked for it ever since, in every rare bookstore I could find. I don't know the title, or the author, but I remember the cover was butter-colored leather, and the pages were edged in red, and it smelt like nutmeg and catnip and dust.

Decades later, and I'm living with Uncle Al again, only this time with a wife and a kid of my own. I asked him, when we first came here, if he still had that book. He gave me a long, unreadable look and said he was sorry, but he hadn't seen it in years and feared it was lost. I almost cried. It was the weirdest thing. But all I said was that it was a damned shame, because Courtney probably would have loved it. She likes those fairy-tale kinds of things; unicorns and such. And I didn't think much more of it, until now.

There's a look that passes between them, like they're two people in one big conspiracy. They make one another smile. She spends most of her free time in his study, and I'm pretty sure they both think I haven't noticed. I have. I don't understand, but I have noticed.

I wanted to give Courtney the things I never had growing up; pretty clothes, a nice place to live, dolls and books and the kinds of things little girls are supposed to like. Someone out there must be laughing at me, because she doesn't seem to want any part of it. She's an incredibly difficult child; always has been. Uncle Al is an incredibly difficult adult; I'm guessing he always has been, too. I'd have expected them to butt heads, not clasp hands over the breakfast table, like two people who want to hug but are too embarrassed to do so in front of an audience. Somehow, he's found a way to give her what she's been missing. I'm a little jealous. I might even be angry, if not for the book-that-no-longer-exists. But I haven't forgotten, Uncle Al. Sometimes I give my daughter a hug, and her hair has the same spicy-dusty smell I remember.

Then she pulls away, and the dream is over again, but only for me. I'm pretty sure she lives there, now.


End file.
